The paradoxical consequence is that we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: he is at once the best known and least known of figures. - P6
The urge to switch from subjunctive to indicative is, to paraphrase Alastair Fowler, always a powerful one. - P15
Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an academic obsession. A glance through the indexes of the many scholarly journals devoted to him and his age reveals such dogged investigations as ‘Linguistic and Informational Entropy in Othello’, ‘Ear Disease and Murder in Hamlet’, ‘Poisson Distributions in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, ‘Shakespeare and the Quebec Nation’, ‘Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?’ and others of similarly inventive cast. - P20
The idea is a simple one: to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record. Which is one reason, of course, it’s so slender. - P20
But plague was only the beginning of England’s deathly woes. The embattled populace also faced constant danger from tuberculosis, measles, rickets, scurvy, two types of smallpox (confluent and haemorrhagic), scrofula, dysentery, and a vast, amorphous array of fluxes and fevers – tertian fever, quartian fever, puerperal fever, ship’s fever, quotidian fever, spotted fever – as well as ‘frenzies’, ‘foul evils’ and other peculiar maladies of vague and numerous type. - P22
In a sense William Shakespeare’s greatest achievement in life wasn’t writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year. - P23
The principal background event of the sixteenth century was England’s change from a Catholic society to a Protestant one – though the course was hardly smooth. England swung from Protestantism under Edward VI to Catholicism under Mary Tudor and back to Protestantism again under Elizabeth. - P25
|